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Christmas
with Ain’t Nick
By Sherlene Hall Bartholomew
click on photos to enlarge
Editor’s
Note: In Sherlene’s last column,
she talked of learning about her ancestor, Nicholas Pinion, whose
wife accused him of killing children. Her column set off an explosion
of letters both defending and deriding Nicholas. It wasn’t
“children” but chickens, Nick’s side claimed.
Eighth great-grandfather
Nicholas Pinion is not one to take lying down the kind of slander
he got in my Thanksgiving column (see “The
Ancestor I Didn’t Want to Find,” in Meridian’s
Turning Hearts Column Archives). Fact is, “Ain’t Nick”
already descended my chimney and emerged, well-sooted, griming my
days and grating my nights.
Nick’s
10th great and the author’s 1st grandson,
Brandon Michael Woodruff, Christmas 2001
Nick’s
hauntings provoked e-letters of condolence, commiseration, and condemnation
from relatives, friends, Saints, and Strangers who read (or wished
they had not) about Nicholas—all of this ending in an Internet
fracas over his chickens.
Finding
out the truth about Ain’t Nick can be discomfiting!
What I did not
admit in my first column about Nick was that I had argued with the
editors of Springfield 1636-1986 that whoever indexed those colonial
court records had misread the early script. Editors Konig and Kaufman
wrote that Nicholas’ wife Elizabeth, in a heated court argument,
accused him of “killing five children, and his wife says,
one of them being a year old.”
I could not
find the Vol. 6 that reported details about this hearing, but did
find an index of Nicholas’ supposed killings of children.
This, I was certain, was the source used to make the case against
my ancestor in this book dividing into two classes, “Distinguished”
and “Obscure” Massachusetts settlers. I argued that
tangled colonial hen-scratchings should have been transcribed to
say that Nick killed five of his neighbor’s chickens!
After all, I
reasoned, had Nick killed children, his Puritan masters would have
harvested his head. He would not have been around two years later,
June of 1649, to be hauled into court by neighbor Quinten Pray,
who accused Nicholas of swearing about his harvest of squashes when
he planted pumpkins. So far as I was concerned, that comforting
feeling I got as I read Nicholas’ records was further assurance
that of all Nick’s sins, one was not infanticide.
Tradition does
persist: Descendant Brandon harvests
squash, Thanksgiving 2001
Since neither
the Springfield Library and Museums Association that published the
book in 1987, nor editors Konig and Kaufman answered my letter making
this case, I attributed their silence to guilty assent and rested
my defense. After all, Nicholas could not have murdered children
and still fathered such kind and good descendants as 6th great grandson
Aaron Ward Tracy, former president of what was then Ogden, Utah’s
Weber College, and my own father, H. Tracy Hall, first to create
a reproducible commercially viable process for synthesizing diamonds,
and named as BYU’s first “Distinguished [sic] Professor”
(Hugh Nibley was the next to be so honored).
H. Tracy
Hall, Ph.D., “Obscure” Nicholas’
7th great grandson
However, as
mentioned in my earlier column about this ancestor, I did an Internet
search that turned up a review of Founding Mothers & Fathers:
Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (Knopf, 1996).
This report detailed how author Mary Beth Norton named Nicholas
Pinion’s as the “most dysfunctional family” on
record in seventeenth-century New England. It made sense to contact
this scholar, who devoted nearly an entire chapter to Nicholas,
before promoting my theory about his chickens.
My notion gave
Cornell’s Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History
a good laugh. She said Elizabeth’s accusation about the five
children was the first of “twenty-six prosecutions over two
decades in four colonies” involving the Pinion family. Therefore
the infanticides could have happened in England which was anxious
enough to ship Nicholas off to suffer and probably die in the New
World. Further, Dr. Norton explained how Puritan law required that
there be two witnesses to a felony before a person could be hanged.
Obviously such infant deaths could have been hidden from witnesses
of any sort. The fact that Nick retained his head did not verify
my opinion that his case involved chickens, not children. She did,
however, acknowledge that on first reading Elisabeth’s accusation,
she wondered if Nick’s wife was overly exercised or even deranged.
Dr. Norton was willing enough to allow that option as salve to concern
for my ancestor’s soul.
I barely had
time to sigh my relief before she asked: “By the way, did
you know that Nicholas’ daughter Ruth was hanged after being
tried in Hartford, Connecticut?”
“Uh, no.
Dare I ask why?”
Norton then
disclosed that court records, still not open to the public, witness
that our Ruth Pinion Moore Briggs was hanged by New Haven magistrates
in 1668, after court testimony that included witnesses enough to
her adultery and decision to destroy the evidence. According to
pp. 36-37 of Norton’s book, Ruth at first denied having given
birth on February 15, 1667/8, but under pressure from the magistrates
“finally admitted that she had been pregnant, had taken savin
(an abortifacient) prepared by her sister, Hannah, and had given
birth in secret. Claiming that the child had been born dead ‘thro
her neglect for want of helpe,’ she revealed that she had
subsequently buried it ‘below her sisters [Mary Pinion’s]
garden by the swampe.’” (Mary Pinion, by the way, is
my ancestress, who had the misfortune to marry Thomas, Nicholas’
son.) Prof. Norton was too kind to suggest such, but it seemed apparent
that Ruth might have been acting, in her perfidity, on family tradition.
Facing death for what the court judged as infanticide, Ruth confessed,
writes Norton, “’that she could not have peace untill
she had made some further discovery of her wickedness.’ She
accordingly confessed to a series of sexual offenses committed in
New Haven over the previous three years.” [Note:
It was not clear, in my reading of Norton’s account, whether
the Court of Assistants at Hartford discounted Ruth’s testimony
about having aborted her baby or whether they judged the act of
abortion itself equivalent to infanticide—were it the latter,
then Ruth was hanged for behavior and an act that millions of Americans
today treat as commonplace.]
In a subsequent
e-letter Dr. Norton, while writing about Nicholas’ son, my
ancestor Thomas Pinion, let slip one of those golden nuggets we
genealogists pan for year after year—the maiden name of Thomas’
wife: "I remembered where I had seen a reference to Thomas
Pinion, and the footnote led me to a bawdy verse written by a friend
of his about Thos's relationship w/ his wife to be, Mary Edwards.
This was in 1664, in Concord, Mass., but Thos was then living in
Sudbury (next town). See Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex (Univ.
of Mass Press, 1986), 180-82. So Thos must have moved first from
Lynn to Sudbury, and then went on to join the rest of the family
in New Haven by 1666, when he ends up in court there. MBN”
My report to
the family about my communications with Dr. Norton got an exercised
response from my attorney brother-in-law, Barry D. Wood, of Arlington,
Virginia, who had innocently invited friends to look for my column
before knowing I would spill family secrets. We Halls have to love
the way Barry defends our Nick, when some in-laws would rush to
pinion my quill. What we love even more is his genealogical brilliance
as applied to his wife’s lines.
Intrigued with
my challenge that someone in the family track Nick’s sleigh
to its home over the ocean, Barry issued a report one day after
my Thanksgiving column was published:
“Nicholas,
as you will recall, was first known to history at the Saugus Iron
Works in Lynn, Essex County, Mass. (same county where Joseph Smith’s
ancestors and the generality of mine were leading much more sober
lives at the time), and later at Ancient
New Haven in what is now Connecticut (where Harold B. Lee and I
share additional very sober ancestors).
“While
I claim NO RELATIONSHIP with this scoundrel Pinion, I do claim the
prize Sherlene offered (there WAS going to be a prize, wasn’t
there?) for finding his homeplace in England.
“vide:
“Nicholas
Pinion married 1 Oct 1639 at Burwash, Sussex, England one Elizabeth
Starre. Obviously, she had starres in her eyes at the time, but
might have done better with another, as her life unfolded. Or perhaps
in a darkened shadow of the Burwash parish church there was a shotgun
(or musket) pushing Nicholas to the altar with Elizabeth, as less
than eight months later there appeared ‘Ruth, christened 24
May 1640 at Burwash, daughter of Nicholas Pinnion alias Spray.’
(Barry then goes on to identify christenings for four of their children
and to name both Nicholas’ and his wife Elizabeth’s
fathers, as well as to identify the probable family place of origin
in the village of Worth!)
Perhaps Ain’t
Nick’s early descent down my chimney was meant to help coordinate
Barry’s discovery of the Pinion homeplace in Sussex with Church
news about groundbreaking, this magical month of December, at Wivelsfield
Green, Sussex, for the first LDS chapel in that county!
When we asked
in amazement how Barry learned so much, so fast, he replied that
it took him all of one hour, using the new on-line IGI now available
on familysearch.org. (How
to do that for your ancestors, too, and important qualifications
about how much we can trust the IGI will be featured in another
column.)
In a subsequent
e-letter, Barry shared this with our extensive family:
"Our ward
choir director is from Sussex, so after rehearsal this afternoon
I asked her about Nicholas' hometown of Burwash. To me it sounded
like a cross between ‘Pittburgh’ and ‘carwash,’
so I wasn't expecting much--some blackened industrial ruin, perhaps.
Quite to the contrary, Liz says that it is right on the Channel.
The ‘wash’ part of its name stems from the way the sea
washes right up in the streets at high tide. There are signs warning
visitors not to park on the lower streets at certain times because
of the way the borough is washed when the tide comes in.
"Burwash
is a very picturesque locale. Real estate there is so much sought-after
that even a tiny cottage there costs at least a million pounds ($1.5
million). Any number of expensive yachts throng the harbor.
"Liz asked
what Nicholas' occupation was. I admitted that I didn't know what
it was in England, but that in America he worked at the Saugus Iron
Works. Liz said it was her impression that the major occupations
around Burwash were fishing and smuggling, though I doubt that we'll
find smuggler as an occupation listed in the parish register.
[Tap this link
to Burwash, home of Rudyard Kipling, smugglers, iron workers, and
the author’s illustrious Pinion family:
http://www.villagenet.co.uk/esussex-iron/villages/burwash.php
]
"That supports
my idea that Nicholas was a Royalist. Another clue: that the Pinion
family did not give their sons Puritan names. While among the Pinions
one finds James, Robert, Martin, Nicholas and the like, my Woods
are naming their sons Obadiah, Josiah and Jeremiah.
"If Nicholas
cast his lot with the Royalists, might he not have been imprisoned
by the Cromwell forces at some point during the Civil War? If so,
how to sentence him for the crime of fighting against Parliament?
"Assuming
that he was not a leading plotter against Cromwell, amputation of
the head might have been too strong a punishment. However, he probably
had no lands to confiscate, and the jails were full, so he was transported
to the colonies to work for a term of years.
"As I may
have mentioned earlier, this is what happened to my ancestor George
Darling. He was a Scott from Mid-Lothian who was taken prisoner
at the Battle of Dunbar in 1649, marched to London and sentenced
to labor in the colonies. Quite a number of these unfortunates ended
up at the Saugus Iron Works performing work that was not deemed
desirable by the local Puritans (and probably for good reason--stoking
the forges was a back-breaking chore). Thus George ended up working
at Saugus in almost the same timeframe as Nicholas, the only difference
being that George stayed in Essex County when his term was up, while
Nicholas relocated to the New Haven colony, where he farmed his
remaining days.
"Against
the backdrop of Nicholas' status as an involuntary migrant to New
England, his occasional use of less than lofty language, preserved
for us by the Puritan scribes, is not surprising. Probably his speech
was no worse than that of Henry VIII, but times and fashions change.
Now, four and a half centuries after Nicholas, public respect for
the second commandment is much the worse, as one can see any night
on Jay Leno (which I haven't watched for months).”
Barry’s
summation: “Here I finish my report, but not before noting
that, allowing for Thomas’ birth about 1642, the sequence
of children for Nicholas and Elizabeth scarcely leaves room for
any to have been done away with by their father. All those christened
in the English records in 1640, 1644, 1646 and (I think) 1647 show
up quite alive and well in New England.
“Thus,
and for various other reasons detailed to Sherlene in a private
e-mail, I am holding to the view that Elizabeth’s accusation
that Nicholas had killed some children is either (a) a misreading
for chickens (Prof. Norton notwithstanding—I have read enough
17th century handwriting to know that what one person thinks is
clearly X, another can easily read as Y) or (b) the effect of a
frenzied mind wherein Nicholas was accused of something he did not
do, just as a great deal of what is testified to on Judge Judy and
the like is actually not true at all.”
I made the mistake
of asking Prof. Norton how she might respond to Barry’s defense,
to which she quietly suggested: “Elizabeth never said the
five children were their own.”
I am left to
surmise that either Nicholas was innocent of infanticide, or our
Lord’s grace is even more extensive than I knew—especially
to those who by birth are condemned to lawless tradition. I am grateful
that judgment is the Lord’s and that my charge is to forgive
and to, myself, shun false tradition. I again affirm the witness
of God’s love for Nicholas Pinion and his family that came
over me as I searched those court records. Even agnostics reading
this report of Nick’s dealings, since I brought him up in
my Thanksgiving column, must admit his continuing involvement with
the living!
As regards our
involvement with Nicholas and his family, I told Barry that the
obvious reward for his efforts on behalf of my Pinions was that
he and wife Virginia stand as proxies for them, as we accomplish
any new temple ordinances on their behalf. I included this offer
in a round-robin letter, inviting members of our family to join
in sacred ceremony, as part our Hall Christmas celebration already
planned for this year. In response, my brother Tracy sent Barry
an e-letter asking if, since Barry found this new information about
Nicholas in the IGI, we might assume that all known Pinion family
members’ temple service was already accomplished. Barry’s
answer: a resounding “NO” (more on this, too, later).
Well, you’d
better watch out for those who dare pout about ancestors we wish
were never found. Chances are we’ll look up one hallowed eve
to find ancestral Ain’t Nicks, at last released from Spirit
prison, placing coal in our deserving socks. Let us hope they’ll
have the grace to give us unwilling, but repentant descendants a
knowing wink and gentle nod.
The author a
few years back, as a true believer in Saintly Nicks.
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